Quick treatment could have saved Richardson

She met Neeson when they made their Broadway debuts in 1993, co-starring in “Anna Christie,” Eugene O’Neill’s drama about a former prostitute and the sailor who falls in love with her.

Her most notable film roles came earlier in her career. Richardson played the title character in Paul Schrader’s “Patty Hearst,” a 1988 biopic about the kidnapped heiress for which the actress became so immersed that even between scenes she wore a blindfold, the better to identify with her real-life counterpart.

Richardson was directed again by Schrader in a 1990 adaptation of Ian McEwan’s “The Comfort of Strangers” and, also in 1990, starred in the screen version of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

She later co-starred with Neeson in “Nell” and with Mia Farrow in “Widows’ Peak.”

Her final feature film, “Wild Child,” has been released internationally but has not been released in the U.S., and Universal Pictures said one had not been scheduled.

Richardson was born in London in 1963, the performing gene inherited not just from her parents (Redgrave and director Tony Richardson), but from her maternal grandparents (Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson), an aunt (Lynn Redgrave) and an uncle (Corin Redgrave). Her younger sister, Joely Richardson, also joined the family business.

She also is survived by two sons, Micheal, 13, and Daniel, 12.

Funeral arrangements will be handled by the Greenwich Village Funeral Home, Borakove said.

Friends and family members remembered Natasha as an unusually poised child, perhaps forced to grow up early when her father left her mother in the late ’60s for Jeanne Moreau. (Tony Richardson died in 1991).

Interviewed by The Associated Press in 2001, Natasha Richardson said she related well to her family if only because, “We’ve all been through it in one way or another and so we’ve had to be strong. Also we embrace life. We are not cynical about life.”

Her screen debut came at 4, when she appeared as a flower girl in “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” directed by her father, whose movies included “Tom Jones” and “The Entertainer.” The show business wand had already tapped her the year before, when she saw her mother in the 1967 film version of the Broadway show “Camelot.”

“She was so beautiful. I still look at that movie and I can’t believe it. It still makes me cry, the beauty of it,” Richardson said.

She studied at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama and was an experienced stage actress by her early 20s, appearing in “On the Razzle,” “Charley’s Aunt” and “The Seagull,” for which the London Drama Critics awarded her most promising newcomer.

Video   Remembering Natasha Richardson March 19: Following a skiing accident, the daughter of British acting royalty died of a head injury at the age of 45. TODAY remembers her life and career. Today show

She and her mother acted together, most recently on Broadway to play the roles of mother and daughter in a one-night benefit concert version of “A Little Night Music,” the Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler musical.

Before meeting up with Neeson, Richardson was married to producer Robert Fox, whose credits include the 1985 staging of “The Seagull” in which his future wife appeared.

She sometimes remarked on the differences between her and her second husband — she from a theatrical dynasty and he from a working-class background in Northern Ireland.

“He’s more laid back, happy to see what happens, whereas I’m a doer and I plan ahead,” Richardson told The Independent on Sunday newspaper in 2003. “The differences sometimes get in the way but they can be the very things that feed a marriage, too.”

She once said that Neeson’s serious injury in a 2000 motorcycle accident — he suffered a crushed pelvis after colliding with a deer in upstate New York — had made her really appreciate life.

“I wake up every morning feeling lucky — which is driven by fear, no doubt, since I know it could all go away,” she told The Daily Telegraph newspaper in 2003.

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